New Delhi, March 6 The mismanagement of Pakistan as a polity by its ruling elite has landed the country in periodic crises, which have been as much political as economic, and the resulting economic turmoil has necessitated 25 IMF programmes, each of which has compounded the country’s structural problems rather than providing a pathway to sustainable growth and development, a Pakistani media report said.
The latest example is the ongoing programme where the IMF has endorsed the government’s free-spending fiscal profligacy while imposing the burden of adjustment on ordinary Pakistanis. The carte blanche on spending comes on top of repeated forbearance of slippages on structural and institutional reform. In doing so, the Fund has failed its basic duty-of-care responsibility to ordinary citizens of a member country, according to an article by Sakib Sherani, a member of several past PMs’ economic advisory councils, in the Dawn newspaper.
Since 2023, under the aegis of the IMF, Pakistan has recorded the largest fiscal adjustment in its history -- cumulatively amounting to 5.6 per cent of GDP. However, 73 per cent of this adjustment has come from revenue measures, with the burden falling disproportionately on already-taxed formal firms, salaried individuals and the less-affluent via petroleum levies and indirect taxation.
At the same time, the government’s extravagant spending has received a free pass from the IMF. Consolidated public expenditure, federal as well as provincial, has risen by 60 pc (FY23–FY26 budgeted) in nominal terms. Non-interest expenditure has increased by 70 pc, with personnel-related spending ballooning from Rs 3.7 trillion to Rs 5.9tr, a 59 per cent increase. Political patronage-driven and pork barrel-ridden development spending has shot up by 64 pc. A large part of the government spending since 2022 has been in the nature of political bribes to different institutional constituencies. Yet, the IMF has looked the other way, the article stated.
The combination of massive tax mobilisation, cuts in subsidies and the rupee depreciation has pushed 114 million Pakistanis (44.7 pc of the population) below the poverty line, according to the World Bank’s estimate as of June 2025. Unemployment stood at 18.8 million, according to the seventh Population and Housing Census 2023, with at least 6.7 million youth unemployed. Real wages of a representative sample of worker categories have declined by 27 pc since March 2022. More Pakistanis are food-insecure now than in 2022 (at a quarter of the population).
The crafting of the programme design by the IMF in a manner that has shifted virtually the entire burden of adjustment onto tax-compliant firms and ordinary Pakistanis, while protecting the government’s extravagant spending on the manufacturing of a new political order, might seem like a ‘technocratic’ oversight at first, but it is anything but that. It is a calculated and politically motivated move. The IMF is no innocent bystander or uninvolved observer. It reviews and signs off on the aggregate fiscal framework and major expenditure envelopes. To give such a glaring immunity to fiscal profligacy while overseeing the ‘austerity’ programme smacks of complicity, the article added.
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